Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov (30 January 1926 – 19 August 1998) was a Soviet military officer. As second-in-command of a nuclear-armed submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Arkhipov blocked the captain's decision to launch a nuclear torpedo against the US Navy, thus averting a large-scale nuclear war. Reflecting on this incident forty years later, Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, remarked that "a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world."^[1]